The diminished availability and high cost of hard woods for use as furniture or attractive building materials has proliferated the use of less expensive wood and wood composites. In many of these cases, the less expensive wood and wood composites are modified or finished such that they appear to be either natural wood or a specific hard wood. In other cases, a decorative image, logo or name is “printed” on the less expensive wood and wood composites. Alternatively, inexpensive wood composites are surfaced with colored or printed vinyl, phenolic-backed or similar decorative laminates, but these laminates all show edges and cracks or delaminate at these locations, and they are themselves costly. Each existing process used to create these wood or wood composite products has disadvantages and trade offs. For example, producing a high quality wood or wood composite product substantially increases plant and production costs while reducing throughput. Conversely, a lower cost wood or wood composite product produced at a higher throughput can be achieved by sacrificing quality and durability. These problems are compounded if the wood or wood composite product is non-planar.
There is, therefore, a need for a method and system that produce a high quality, durable and economical wood or wood composite substrate having an image on at least one surface. Moreover, there is a need for such a method and system to be implemented as a relatively high throughput production line process that will work with both planar and non-planar substrates and objects.